Accessibility Help
The St. Leger Homes' website has been designed to be both
attractive and accessible to use, providing all users with access
to the site, whatever their ability.
We've listed below many of the "best practise" techniques to
make the St. Leger Homes a more usable and accessible website to
use.
Usability
Viewing the website
The website has been designed to provide a site that is simple
and user friendly. With a sensible a simple site navigation
and meaningful page names, all information should be accessible
with only a few clicks of the mouse. We've also tested the site in
the following web-browsers:
- MS IE 6.0
- MSIE 7.0
- Mozilla Firefox 1.0.7
- Mozilla Firefox 1.5.x
- Safari 1.x
Our website includes a:
A "Useful Features" top bar – Accessible from every page, this
top bar gives users access to vital features of the website.
These include:
- Skip Navigation – allows visitors using screen readers to jump
straight to the main page content
- Text Only Version of the site – presented with high-contrast
yellow text on a black background, the text only version of the
website display the site content in an easy-to-read
- View as PDF – allows the current page to be viewed and saved in
PDF format.
- Side Navigation. An easy to use menu system that expands to
display any sub-pages of the current page. When a page is selected,
it moved to the top of the menu.
- Main content area – the main part of the
website where you can read the information you have selected
- Footer on all pages containing address and contact information
on all pages. The footer also includes a feedback email address
that encourages users to comment on the site.
Accessibility features
We have designed all our templates to help make the website
accessible to all users including disabled users.
W3C Compliance
The St. Leger website has been coded in keeping with the
guidelines issued by W3C/WAI.
Speech Enabled
The website is also 'speech-enabled', using a system called
Browsealoud. By installing a simple free download onto your computer, which
you can download using the link on this page, you have the text on
our web pages and some documents read out loud. This can be a
huge help to those with visual impairment, dyslexia, literacy
difficulties or those for whom English is a second language.
Once you have made the initial download it will allow you to
easily access a number of other local and national government
websites, as well as interenet search engines such as Google and
Yahoo.
Once the software has been downloaded to your PC, look for the
browsealoud icon in your 'system tray' (which is usually at the
bottom right-hand corner of the screen). Right click on the
icon and choose 'open browsealoud settings' from the menu.
You can now customise the settings, such as male or female voice,
changing the speed, pitch and volume of the reader.
Text only
As well as making all graphic templates accessible, we have also
included a text only option. This will allow users to view
the website in high contrast and without graphics and pictures.
Tab indexing
We have included tab indexing on our website which makes tabbing
through our site easier. It also helps users who access the
website using only a keyboard.
This is the tab order of our website
- Skip
Navigation
-
Text Only
- About
St. Leger Homes
- View
as PDF
- Staff
Login
- Accessibility
- Site
Map
- Contact
Us
- Main Menu
- Other Navigation
- Main Content
Assistive Technology
Disabled users can use assistive technology to help them use our
website. We have tested our website with both text-only
browsers and screen magnifiers.
Please let us know if you have any problems using these tools or
would like to recommend ways we can improve access to our
website. We will do our best to make improvements.
Visual design
To help you view our website we have:
- Used colours with a maximum contrast between the background and
foreground
- Given all meaningful images and graphics an Alt-text name which
describes what you would be looking at if the image was
displayed
- Chosen the standard blue colour for all active hyperlinks
- Used style sheets so you can change the size of the text using
your browsers text size controls: